The dev team has recognized the following issues with the game/alpha test.
-The impact of RMT, bots, and cheating on fairness and progression
-PvP and corruption systems that don’t yet feel consistent or fully realized
-Issues surrounding caravans, crates, and risk-versus-reward gameplay
-Content and system bugs that interrupt gameplay
-Performance and stability problems that pull you out of the world
BOTS: This SHOULD have been a TOP focus from day 1. How it has even gotten to the point it's at is unbelievable. I ran from Mira to Joeva this morning and more than HALF the characters I seen were behaving like BOTS!. Gathering and trade routes are completely toast because of this. Not to mention the markets are fucked because of it.
RMT: The game is designed to allow players to BUY power. A player can simply purchase gold from a seller online and easily surpass someone who's played for weeks. This DESTROYS progression for EVERYONE. There is no joy in a game where you can buy power, legally or illegally. The players who buy it, basically get bored in a week and leave until the next iteration. The players who suffer it are discouraged and leave. No one wins EXCEPT the gold sellers. You've designed the game for RMT.
CHEATING: Fly hacks, overlays, duplications, ect. The realms are trashed. Wipe them.
PvP: What PvP? There is no PvP. No one kills unflagged players because corruption is a joke of a system. It's a half thought out shower thought, no one thought about the second, third, or fourth order of effects of such a simplistic system. Wars? Those are joke too. The open PvP areas are probably the best place for it, IF you can ever find anyone there that's worth PvPing. The chances you find a fair PvP fight ANYWHERE is near zero. You're either zerging or being zerged. It's SHIT PVP!
TRADE PACKS: THERE IS NO POINT TO THIS SYSTEM THE BOTS HAVE DESTROYED IT. THEY HAVE WON! Value reduction needs to be individually based. How many times YOU have ran that route, not how many times EVERYONE has ran that route. BOTS RUN THIS ROUTE SO YOU CAN'T, TO FUNNEL YOU TO BUY GOLD. Sure if you catch it when the node pops, then yeah you can get gold. But GL with that.
Risk vs Reward: This is a generalized statement, that means there should be a reason to X or do Y. No one risks corruption until they're 25 on purpose. Risk vs Reward is a joke right now. When there's risk there's no reward, where there's reward there's very little risk.
CONTENT: It's alpha… FINISH THE SYSTEMS/FEATURES. Why are you worried about CONTENT when there are MISSING FEATURES. What happened to a MVP? A minimal viable product. The demo of all the working features? Or are we still making the MVP?
BUGS: It's alpha, the gameplay will be interrupted, we signed up for this.
PERFORMANCE: Good luck with dynamic towns. None baked assets are never going to give you the performance needed. GPUs will be tac'd out.
STABILITY: It's gotten better.
The design choices have put you in this position. And you've been warned by the testers for YEARS. Corruption, crafting, bot, rmt, exploits, wars, and so on. There are numerous posts here on YOUR forums, from testers that have been here since it opened, telling you about the issues YOU FINALLY decide to recognize.
Design flaws:
1. System that supports RMT. You can buy power. Your gear is the ONLY thing what matters. You can't EVEN ATTACK without a weapon.
2. Wasted gear assets. Having each race show a different skin for each gear set is a waste of artist hours and breaks immersion. You could have 5x the assets at least had you not chosen this.
3. Unreasonable requirements for making low level high quality gear. No one will make epic apprentice gear. There's no point. You level so quickly through it. The only reason we see journeymen heroics and epics is because it's end game. BASIC MATH would have told you this would be issue.
4. Wasted opportunity for crafting gear. Crafting could have so much more depth. Using different ores, or gems, or leathers could have affected the type of stats or bonus's the gear got. Want more intelligence, put in epic emeralds. Want more strength use epic rubies. Want dex, use tendonite not copper. Region pieces can still govern the base status. Give the player a choice, not the server.
5. 18G boat gets destroyed, with no way to recover. You basically just cut off every causal from using a boat. Make them recoverable. Make a smaller cheaper boat for 1 to 3 players.
6. No fast bot reporting. Who did you make this game for? Gold sellers? How as this not in day 1? Anyone who has ever played an mmo before would have told this is would be a massive issue.
7. Harbringers. Why? What the hell was the point? To give people at end game more shit to do? Why don't you FINISH THE PLANNED FEATURES first?
8. Hunting, tanning, leatherworking. With huntable mobs so few, tanning and leatherworking are beyond ridiculous to do. Yes you can grind the reliable spots for wolves, raptors, otters, ect. If there's no bots, or other players contesting it. Maybe there's some spots I don't know of, not everything is on the codex/forge maps. But there's a reason those sell so well… How was hunting put behind harbingers?
9. Physical Power/Magic Power. The most basic system for scaling power. It's a GEAR SCORE. Want to invite a physical dps to your group, 'what's or physical power?'.
10. Gearing of 1-9, 10-19, 20-29. Is flawed. You go from being over powered to swinging a wet noodle. Sure IF you get a recipe that you can actually craft you might get 1 or 2 pieces that help you hit harder, or take less damage. But it won't matter until you roll over to the next 10s and equip that level blocks gear.
11. TANK. Why? just why did you name it that? Why isn't the Cleric called "Healer". You named a class a party role. WTF?!? does it really matter? No, but it's indictive of your other choices.
12. Where's religion? Is that getting scraped? Is it not important enough to add in now for testing?
13. AOE grinding. This is trash, it's trash leveling. You have to fix this. This is power leveling. It's not fun. Solo exp should be the slowest, 2's 3's groups should be next up, full 8 at a poi should be the best. But no go to a place with mobs that hardly leash, gather in as much as your tank and healer can handle. And burn it down with aoe.
14. Lack of PvP. There's no PvP in the game. There's ganking and zerging. Without meaningful PvP there is no PvP. There is no end to good ideas for meaningful PvP. Just read the forums.
15. More PvP. If you flag up before 25 you get exp loss (call it debt all you want but it's lost time.) As a 25 you don't lose anything. No exp loss if you die to a 'max' level player, or no exp loss in pvp. If a 25 goes corrupt they really only do so with friend around to kill them and pick up their stuff. It's what I do… There needs to be a chance of your items going to the void. Corrupted players should have a risk of de-leveling.
16. Corruption: It's incomplete. It's anti-pvp, and that' by design, to police the players in the open world, but there is really no other PvP.
17. Where the hell is the Arena? I want an Arena with Power Level classes, like weight classes. 0-100, 101-200, ect.
18. Where are the factions? There's your guild that's it. Your citizen ship doesn't mean anything. An extra storage container? Relic bonus, if you care about it. Mayorship? That's a joke in itself.
19. Town storage stacks to 44? I can hold more on my character than I can put in storage…
20. Guild storage limitations. No way to upgrade it.
21. Guild bank, no coin storage?
22. Flying mount advantage is way too high. People want to be mayor JUST for the mount, then they ignore the town.
23. Class skill choices? There's hardly any choice for the classes. At 25 you'll be able to select just about all of them. The only thing that will differ between you and another player is how much time you spent crafting your epic bis or how much crypto you spent on game gold from a RMT site.
24. The markets are basically an AH with an extra step of having to click on each 'store'. Was this the best? Lets not remake amazon market place, but there could definitely be a more immersive and functional way to setup the base markets.
25. Lack of instanced dungeons/pois/content. This is a HUGE missed opportunity. Not just for PvE content but for actual PvP content. I'm okay with there being limited instanced content, but currently there is zero, and there is nothing on the horizon. I like the POIs and pocket dungeons, but a lack controlled area where skills can actually be honed and tested is a critical miss by the design team.
26. The VFX is overwhelming, There's too much damn glittery, flashy, effects on the mobs from the other party members. YOU CAN'T SEE ANYTHING PASSED THE VFX!
27. The UI crafting. It's boring, crafting isn't engaging. There are great systems out there they could pull from but what do we get? Data entry levels of fun. And so many clicks to make one item, then you have to do it again, and again.
This is a critique of the design choices, not the developers actually making the things happen passed to them from the idea fairy team. God speed to those engineers, developers, and artists.
Can Ashes of Creation rise from its own ashes?
